[Rule-list] Introduction

[Geoff Burling]

On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, Martin Stricker wrote:

> First of all, welcome!

Thanks.
>
> Geoff Burling wrote:
>
> >      I've been putting Slinky-0.1.9a thru some tests on an old
> > 486 I have, & have found some interesting bugs -- but due to what I
> > suspect are hardware problems, I'm not sure if I should report them
> > just yet.
>
> Please do, it might be interesting, or at least we can warn people with
> problematic hardware.

Well, first off I found it a bit hard to find the latest version of slinky
on the web site. I ended up downloading it from www.tuxfan.homeip.net.

If it's accessible from the web site, could the image be placed in directories
marked ``miniconda" & ``slinky"? It'd make things easier for slow-witted
people like me to find.

The test system is a 486DX33 processor with 16MB or RAM & a Quantum 540 MB
hardrive. (Originally I had a SCSI 4x CD drive in the sytem, but since the
kernel on the slinky image doesn't handle SCSI, I bought a 6x IDE CDROM drive
for $10-- & slapped it in. And looking around in the stores, I see I can
buy a new 52x drive for just under $40.--.)

I suspect the CDROM drive because occasionally when slinky (both 0.1.5 &
0.1.9a) unpacked the rpms, occasionally I would see on the console screen
a report of a MD5 sum mismatch. I also saw reports of a few other kinds
of errors (e.g., one was a cpio read error.) Later, I could unpack the
rpm package without any problems -- & the packages slinky had varied between
the two versions.

However, when I looked at the log file, all it reported was the following:

Error reported while installing /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/modutils-2.4.6-4.i386.rpm.
Error reported while installing /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/info-4.0b-3.i386.rpm.
Error reported while installing /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/findutils-4.1.7-1.i386.rpm.
Error reported while installing /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/grub-0.90-11.i386.rpm.
Error reported while installing /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/mount-2.11g-5.i386.rpm.
Error reported while installing /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/words-2-17.noarch.rpm.
Error reported while installing /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS/cracklib-dicts-2.7-12.i386.rpm.
[rest of the log snipped]

The rest of the error information was not captured. I wonder if this incomplete
information is due to how rpm directs its output, as I had problems capturing
messages when I ran ``rpm -vvh $RPM_PACKAGE" to a log file.

Lastly, it appears that RH by default starts up the slocate daemon, as well
as uses ext3 with the journaling mechanism turned on. Which IMHO is not
only overkill, but caused my poor, elderly 486 to hit a load average over
2.50 for the first 30 minutes after the reboot! And when I performed a
kill -1 on the two processes behind these features, I lost some files I
had copied over to /tmp. (Well, I assume running kill -1 on slocate & the
journaling processes had caused the files to disappear. The alternative is
the HD is about to crash.)

Bringing the system back up as I write this failed to recreate the 2.50+
load average. Now I know I didn't imagine this . . . (but it's not the
first time I've experienced unreproduceable results.)
>
> > (Before I was laid off last year, I worked as a software QA engineer,
> > so I hope none of you mind the odd way I do things.)
>
> QA is always a Good Thing (TM), even though it can be really awkward ;-)
>
Geoff


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